A Shocker on Shock Street
A Shocker on Shock Street
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Book information
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Two kids who really enjoy the Shock Street series of horror movies test drive the new Shock Street-themed amusement park, where they discover that things are not as OSHA-compliant as they seem.
Transcript[edit | edit source]
Front Tagline: It's a real dead end.
Back Tagline: Talk About Shock Treatment!
Official Book Description:
Erin Wright and her best friend, Marty, love horror movies. Especially Shocker on Shock Street Movies. All kinds of scary creatures live on Shock Street. The Toadinator. Ape Face. The Mad Mangler.
But when Erin and Marty visit the new Shocker Studio Theme Park, they get the scare of their lives.
First their tram gets stuck in The Cave of the Living Creeps. Then they're attacked by a group of enormous praying mantises!
Real life is a whole lot scarier than the movies. But Shock Street isn't really real. Is it?
Brief Synopsis:
Erin Wright and her best friend Marty are big fans of a series of horror movies made under the Shock Street banner. Luckily for Erin, her father happens to be the designer of the new studio theme park for Shock Street! Erin's father has designed an intricate system of robotics for the new theme park attraction and he wants Erin and Marty to be the first kids ever to tour the park! And if I told you that Erin and her best friend Marty look like twins even though they're not related, can you too figure out the ending of the book before it even begins?
Erin and Marty are dropped off at the theme park and are introduced to their tour guide Linda, who isn't much of a tour guide as this is the first and last time in the whole novel that she makes an appearance. She hands the kids red toy guns and informs them that they are special monster-freezing guns. She then drops one of the guns and it fires off on her and she pretends to be frozen, but a ha she was just kidding... well, maybe it's okay that she doesn't show up again in the novel.
Erin and Marty are told that they will be the only ones on the tour, which like in Jurassic Park is led thru the entire park on a tracked tram. The tram first leads the kids through a haunted house, which then turns into an indoor roller coaster. Luckily the trams are not fitted with safety belts and the two kids almost fall out of the carts to their deaths, which makes the ride still comparatively safer than riding the log flume at Magic Mountain.[1]
After the kids exit the haunted house, their tram is approached by various "stars" of the Shock Street movies, including ApeFace and a man who looks like a toad. In the single scariest moment of the book, the stars sign autographs for the kids.
Next up the tram enters "the Cave of the Living Creeps!" Apparently the Shock Street Theme Park is looking to be both cost-inefficient and criminally negligent, as upon entering the cave, large snake-sized white worms drop on the kids, followed by a trip through a giant spider web filled with hundreds of crawling, real spiders. When the tram stalls in the middle of the cave, the two kids get out and decide to walk to find an exit, only to find themselves surrounded by a half-dozen giant praying mantises. What.
In another rip-off homage to Jurassic Park, the praying mantises spit hot sticky tar at the kids[2], until Erin has the brilliant idea that to stop the mantises, they need to step on them, like with real insects. What.
After kicking away what proves to be the pussiest group of giant mantises ever, the kids finally exit the cave and find themselves on a to-scale representation of the Shock Street, which is a locale featured repeatedly in the series of films these two enjoy. Marty, in accordance with the plot's requirement that he make the worst decisions possible, decides to visit the graveyard. Marty falls in an open grave and as Erin attempts to fish him out, hundreds of green hands thrust out of the ground in all directions. The hands pin Marty to the ground and Erin kicks away at them, with the two kids both losing their shoes and socks in the process of freeing Marty. As they run to escape the cemetery, they decide that they need to find the main service road so they can find their way back to the main studio building. Erin spots an elevated stone wall to assist in being able to spot the road from a higher vantage point. As the kids hop barefoot towards the wall, they get trapped in quicksand. What.
The two kids sink down to their noses and death is certain until they are rescued by two werewolves, who pull them out of the mud. What.
The two werewolves are Wolf Girl and Wolf Boy, two more stars of the Shock Street series. The kids try to reason with the stars of the attraction, but after the wolves try to eat the kids, they realize that they're not actors or robots at all, but actual monsters. Erin and Marty make it to the top of the wall and the wolves try jumping up to snatch the kids repeatedly. Erin finds one of the red toy guns they were given and aims it at the monsters, yet just like any souvenir you get at a theme park, it turns out to be useless junk. The two kids fall backwards on the other side of the wall at the same convenient time that the wolves make their way to the top of the wall. The two kids spot their tram moving quickly in the distance and they try to run to catch it. As Erin and Marty are running towards the tram, the wolves are in hot, yet apparently lackadaisical pursuit of the kids. The two manage to jump into the last seatcar of the tram and they speed away past the wolves in triumph.
But the tram is full of skeletons. What.
Then the tram of skeletons heads right towards a giant stone castle! The two kids jump out just in time as the tram crashes through the stone castle! Wow, I don't care!
The two kids run around a little while until they find themselves back on the street they call Shock, cursing themselves because they got there too late.[3] "Cut!" Yells the director, who then walks over to the two kids and tells them how successful filming has gone. Erin is confused, which is understandable because nothing that happens in this book seems to have any relation to the events that preceded it, and she wants to see her dad. The director tells the kids that all they have to do is run through "Shockro's House of Shocks" and take a left and they'll find Erin's dad. Erin knows from watching the movies that the entryway to Shockro's House of Shocks would normally cause anyone entering to be killed instantly by thousands of volts of powerful electricity. The director explains that the kids have nothing to fear because this is a movie set after all.
Marty runs towards the house with Erin right behind him. Erin looks behind her and sees that the director has a giant plug running through his back-- HE'S A ROBOT! She screams to stop Marty but she's too late and he enters the house and is hit with a powerful shock that drops him to the ground. Erin runs after him to save him. As she runs over to the body, she sees her dad inside the building. But then she realizes it's not really her dad at all. And that's when...
But the Twist is:
...her speech slurs and grounds to a halt. Both the Marty and Erin robots have stopped working correctly. Erin's "Dad," the robotics expert, tells his co-workers that they just need some new chips and then the robotic kids'll be fine to finish testing out the theme park.
the Platonic Boy-Girl Relationship:
Erin Wright and her identical friend Marty, whose socks and shoes disappear halfway through the novel.
Questionable Parenting:
Erin's dad programs his robot daughter to not recognize a mother. Focus on the Family[4] stresses that the only successful parental relationships a child can forge are with both a mother and a father. There aren't like special rules for robots, you prick.
Foreshadowing Alert:
Erin's dad tells Marty not to "blow a fuse" by getting too excited about the theme park. He then facetiously suggests keeping Marty on a leash, to which Marty responds by acting like a dog. What.
Memorable Cliffhanger Chapter Ending:
Hall of Fame Cliffhanger! Ch 3/4:
Erin's dad has some bad news for Erin, some very bad news... Except not really, he was only joking!
Great Prose Alert:
"It was darker than the darkest night."
Conclusions:
More like A Shocker on Shit Street.
Comments[edit | edit source]
An annotated list of blog comments that received official replies can be found here.
References[edit | edit source]
- ↑ There have indeed been reports of injuries on this ride.
- ↑ The specific Jurassic Park scene this is referring to is when Dennis Nedry (played by Wayne Knight) is killed by a Dilophosaur, which was given an aigrette frill and poisonous spit as creative license.
- ↑ This is a reference to the chorus of the song "Straight Street" by the Fiery Furnaces: "So I walked up the length of the street they call straight/Cursing myself cause I got there too late."
- ↑ A Christian organization which strives to keep traditional family values.
Fast Forward[edit | edit source]
- In the entry on Welcome to Camp Nightmare, this book is used as an example on how not to do a major twist ending.
- In the original series retrospect, Troy names this book the fourth worst of the lot with these comments:
One of the worst examples of what would become a growing trend in the series, the "Let's just line up crazy things in a row from the beginning of the book to the end" approach. Two problems. Firstly, that's a really unwieldy name for an approach. Secondly, despite how easily mockable these sort of books are, thus making my job easier, they are still infuriatingly bad.
Trivia[edit | edit source]
- Despite being the seventh review, this is the first post on the blog that references a song. (A good omen of things that were yet to come.)
- The running gag "What." appears six times.
